


you live for the fight when it's all that you've got

by StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Death, Divorce, Introspection, POV Rachel, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rachel Berenson-centric, Trauma, War, all those fun animorphs tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:40:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25722229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese/pseuds/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese
Summary: When she was ten years old, Rachel's father promised to keep her safe forever.Even then, she knew it was a lie.
Kudos: 20





	you live for the fight when it's all that you've got

Rachel Berenson had been ten years old when an adult failed her for the first time. 

Her father had knelt in front of her, and explained, carefully and calmly, that he and Rachel’s mother were going to get a divorce, and Rachel had to be a big girl and help take care of her sisters from now on.

Rachel had burst into tears and tackled him in a hug. Her father had hugged back just as tightly, even as her mother watched from the doorway, face carefully blank.

“Don’t worry, honey,” her father had murmured into her hair. “I’ll always be here for you, even though I won’t be living here anymore. When we go to court, you know, they’ll let you pick who you want to live with, sweetheart. I’ll keep you safe forever.”

Rachel pulled away from the hug, and studied her father.

Dad was the _fun_ parent. Dad took Rachel and her sisters to the zoo and to amusement parks and to the movies. Dad let them have candy before dinner and watched TV with them. Rachel loved her father, and she knew that he loved her, too.

But… Dad was almost never home. Whenever Mom had to work early, Dad was never there to help Rachel make breakfast, or to put Sara’s shoes on. Whenever Mom worked late, Dad would be tetchy and annoyed. 

Rachel sniffled loudly, and nodded, and clutched her mother’s hand tightly as her father got into a taxi and drove away.

Rachel went outside, climbed as high as she could go in the tree in the backyard, and stayed there until her mother called her in for dinner.

Looking back, Rachel knew that even then she knew her father could not keep her safe forever. 

* * *

When the court date came, Rachel said she wanted to live with her mother, and pretended not to see her father crying.

* * *

For the next three years, Rachel helped her mother with her sisters, went to gymnastics practice, aced her classes, and went to the mall with her best friend Cassie. She was an average, everyday, completely normal mall rat.

And then Rachel, Cassie, Rachel’s cousin Jake, Jake’s best friend Marco, and a cute stranger named Tobias decided to walk home together. 

Afterwards, she would wonder what might have happened if she had stayed just a _little_ longer in JC Penny, or if she and Cassie had left only a minute before Jake and Marco ran out of quarters, or if they had simply decided not to take the shortcut at all.

Rachel pressed her hand to the side of a glowing blue cube, and did not think about how the alien in front of them was breathing all wrong and how the bleeding wasn’t stopping, and she especially did not think about her father’s voice saying _“I’ll keep you safe forever.”_ to a little girl that he would have said anything to, if it meant he could keep her. 

* * *

Marco was the first one to see the honeyed poison, because of course he was. “We’re all going to get ourselves _killed_ ,” he would say, and Rachel would laugh and flip her hair over her shoulder. Killed? Impossible. They could morph, couldn’t they? Marco didn’t understand. He was a gorilla, the closest of them all to being human. He had never felt the sheer power of the elephant. In that body, Rachel was invincible.

When she got the grizzly morph, she nearly lost herself in the total power of the morph. She loved it. She loved it more than anything she’d ever felt. She got high off the feeling of being invulnerable.

She didn’t need anybody to keep her safe. Rachel could keep herself safe. 

* * *

Rachel’s father has never seen a dead body, and certainly not one that he’s killed himself.

Sometimes, Rachel wonders what he would say if she told him that her weekday nights were mostly spent violently eviscerating humans and aliens alike.

(It turns out that she doesn’t have to wonder– she will never get the chance to tell him.) 

* * *

The David situation is one of the things that will keep her awake at night for the next two years. It will bother all of them, to some degree. Cassie, who thought of the plan. Jake, who approved it. Marco, who came up with the finer details. And her. Rachel, who carried it out.

Even as they established the final components of the plan, Rachel could see them glancing around at each other uneasily. Was this right? Almost certainly not. Should they be doing this? Irrelevant– they _had_ to.

They _had_ to.

So Rachel grasps it as tightly as she can, and she holds on to that awful, terrible necessity, and she prays that it gives her the strength to do what she has to.

“Let’s do it,” she says.

Nobody else was going to say it. That was Rachel’s job. She, and Marco, and Ax. Sometimes Tobias, too. Push the others when their morals stalled them. 

But not this time.

Rachel was the one willing to do what nobody else was. 

The one who was willing to bell the cat.

_“I’ll keep you safe forever.”_

What a beautiful lie.

Rachel sat in a construction site, looking resolutely up at the moon, and listened to a boy scream and beg for his life, and kept listening even as his pleas turned to sobs, and eventually, to soft whimpers as Ax marked off two hours and his fate was sealed.

In one night, _“let’s do it”_ became _“I’ll do it”._

* * *

Rachel woke up screaming, and Jordan ran into her room, begging to know what was wrong. Rachel had shouted at her to _get out!_ , ignoring the way Jordan started to cry.

Rachel woke up screaming, and Sara tugged their mother to her bedroom, eyes huge and watering. Her mother had tried to touch Rachel’s hair, and Rachel had jerked away. 

Rachel woke up screaming, covered in invisible blood, and wondered when _taking_ out a problem began to feel more natural than _talking_ out a problem.

She thought of the phrase _“I’ll keep you safe forever”_ and couldn’t decide if she wanted to cry or throw up. 

* * *

Rachel learned to muffle the screams, and to cry in the bathrooms and janitorial closets at school instead of her bedroom.

One time, she found Jake in a closet during lunchtime, his eyes already red and puffy. They stared at each other, frozen, for what must have only been a few seconds but stretched on into years. 

Rachel slammed the door shut and ducked into the girls’ bathroom instead.

They never spoke about it. 

* * *

Crayak calls her a weapon. Jake calls her dangerous. Marco calls her reckless. Cassie calls her fearless.

Rachel just calls herself the bad guy. She’s the bad guy on their team of good guys. And hey, if you round up, they’re all good guys, right? She’s on their team. She’s on the good side, even if she’s… different.

_“I’ll keep you safe forever.”_

_Dad, you have no idea how much I wish you could._

She is the go-to, the one to call when someone needed their dirty work done. She is not afraid to get her hands bloody if it means her friends don’t have to. That’s her strength, and her weakness. She’d do anything for her friends. All of them would do anything for each other.

But when Cassie leaves her and a rat-who-is-not-a-rat in a dark alleyway, Rachel has never felt more alone.

It’s Rachel who makes the sacrifice. She lets the others whisper things about her behind her back, so that they never have to look a boy their age in the eyes as he begs them to kill him. 

There is a certain kind of poison in doing that, and she drinks it knowingly, with her eyes wide open.

_“While you do the right thing, I do the necessary thing.”_

Rachel is very, very good at doing the necessary thing. She is not so good at doing the right thing, but she tries, even when she would rather give up and eviscerate someone instead.

She isn’t sure when that word– _eviscerate_ – had become a normal part of her life. 

She isn’t sure why it’s her first instinct when David looks her in the eye and asks to be murdered. 

* * *

Rachel was ten when her parents divorced. She was ten-and-a-half when she chose to live with her mother and not her father. She was thirteen when a dying alien told her to run. She was fourteen-almost-fifteen when she met a boy who would haunt her for the rest of her life. She was sixteen when she cried in an alleyway as the boy begged her to kill him. She was three months away from turning seventeen when she died.

But she was strong. She was brave. She was good. She mattered.

Her father’s words still rang in her head.

 _Don’t worry, Dad,_ she thought, clinging to the top of Tom’s head and waiting for Jake’s signal, _it’s my turn to keep you safe now._

< Rachel? Go. >

_Let’s do it._


End file.
